Why India’s digitalisation matters for the UK

Britain can follow in the footsteps of Delhi’s mass-digitalisation

A decade ago, less than 20 per cent of India’s billion-strong population had access to the internet. Today, over 60 per cent are netizens. Indians are online on some of the fastest connection speeds on the planet, at among the lowest prices per GB of data. It is both the market with the largest headroom for further growth as its 5G rollout leads much of the developed world and the second largest cohort of internet users. 
So far so good for Indians on social media, including those purveying funny cat videos and the like. But, as experience shows, public digital infrastructure using the internet and the GPS has transformed lives around the world. And today, India is no exception, in fact, it is a world leader in the use of digital technology for governance, FinTech and services.
Is the Indian example replicable in emerging markets and the developed world? I believe it is. What will it take to make that happen? Put differently, what additional layers of public infrastructure will enable a more equitable, inclusive digital future for all?
This is where the digital stack India built for hundreds of millions of its people points to a viable path. This bedrock-level platform has now enrolled over 1.35 billion Indians. This digital identity system is based on disaggregated data storage, with access controlled by the citizen and anonymised to preserve privacy. 
Building off this layer are a raft of Application Programming Interface (API)-based digital public infrastructure tools, such as a Universal Payment Interface, which offers inter-operability at zero cost to the user, to all participants in the Indian payment ecosystem. The Indian UPI links over 350 banks and 260mn unique users, many times more than the number of credit card users.
Through this Digital Stack, India is now the world’s largest market for digital payment services: over 117 billion transactions worth £2 trillion were recorded in 2023 alone. Put differently, more payment solutions were recorded in India than in the next five major FinTech user countries together. 
It has also turbocharged the formalisation of India’s economy; constricted the informal economy; generated a sharp spike in banking inclusion (from under 50 per cent of the population a decade ago, to over 80 per cent today); and plugged huge holes in the leaky financial pipelines carrying benefits to India’s poorest citizens in state-funded social payment schemes. 
Indeed, so much has this helped that India has saved something close to $28 billion in less than five years. This means better targeted benefit schemes and, of course, something finance ministers love: more fiscal headroom.
Our Digital Stack is the basis for other governance and socio-economic innovations as well: everything from driving licences to railway bookings and healthcare services, and almost all other areas of government-public interface. 
And it is the basis for a rapid rollout of new private sector solutions that offer everything from five-minute grocery delivery services to biometric banking, where cash can be withdrawn without ATMs or local bank branches. These could be relevant, for instance, in under-banked areas even in the UK.
There are those who fear and litigated against our Aadhaar system, including before our Supreme Court. However, our Digital Stack was convincingly found to be impervious by design against surveillance because it holds minimal, non-searchable information and federated storage of data. 
It also offers privacy by design: baked into the foundational code are a digital consent artefact that implements privacy principles of Notice and Consent, Purpose Specification, Data Minimisation and Retention restrictions. And the system is accessible to all, including those who are digitally challenged, including through assisted and offline modes of operation.
Why does this matter to the UK? Firstly, the DPI revolution offers a modular, replicable and technologically-sophisticated system for emerging markets, LDCs as well as developed nations.
Secondly, modular versions of the Indian system offer state-developed bedrock platforms for identity, payment and other state-monopoly services, at zero cost to the user. And private sector players can build optional, for-profit solutions on top.
Furthermore, India’s Digital Stack is interoperable. That is, different digital assets can speak to each other and be built on top of each other. This is distinct from different vertically-consolidated solutions that are run separately by everyone from the tax collector to the veterinarian. In other words, services can be delivered via a whole-of-society approach, rather than in silos. This makes our digital stack relevant, including for use in the UK.
It is also a democratic force-multiplier: Well-designed DPIs give individual citizens personal control over not only their data, but also their interface with the state. Surely this is better than trusting any firm or government department with these tools of daily life? As states ramp up digital governance mechanisms, democracies must ask: should we offer a secure, private and viable digital architecture product to partners? Or must citizens inevitably cede space?
As India successfully offers governance solutions to all its people across the divides of geography, age and wealth levels, it further offers an experience that is also relevant to the UK’s development partnerships in third countries as well. As partners as diverse as the World Bank and the Gates Foundation have noted, India already offers modular, replicable and open architecture-based blocks of a similar system to be deployed in the Global South. The UK and India could work on these trilaterally, or through organisations like the Commonwealth.
Finally, the next generation of digital governance and business services will be delivered in the AI era. India and the UK have every reason to jointly innovate and develop the next generation of credentialing and data securing systems, so that institutional resistance to change in all our societies does not find new problems to every technological solution.
And if India, with millions of its 1.4 billion people still living in multiple centuries at the same time can grasp the promise of technology to liberate themselves from the age-old scourges of poverty and disease, surely a rich society like the UK should be able to do so as well?
H.E. Mr Vikram K. Doraiswami is the Indian High Commissioner